Still They Persist: Protest Art From the 2017 Women's Marches

Join us for the opening and innaugural exhibit of an evolving collection of posters and ephemera from the Women's Marches of 2017!

A recently formed group of socially minded members of the Cincinnati arts community calling themselves FemFour will launch a touring exhibition this coming spring of politically charged signs from the internationally observed Women’s March of 2017.With the aim of keeping the words and images made and deployed by human rights advocates who took to the streets of cities around the country this past January circulating within the public sphere, FemFour has put together a traveling archive of posters and placards, sculptures, textiles, and photo documentation from the day, entitled, 'Still They Persist: Protest Art of the 2017 Women's Marches'.

As part of this project, FemFour will also document in published form the private collection of largely ephemeral artworks made, held or worn as temporary objects of resistance by artists and amateurs alike. In doing so, the FemFour hopes that the artifacts included in Still They Persist might serve as an ongoing visual demonstration: a chorus of wavering yet insistent voices in the street that represent the plurality of postmodern feminism, and can speak to the varying facets of human rights injustices currently being debated in state and federal legislatures around the country.

Whereas one of the criticisms leveled at the Women’s March on Washington was that the movement lacked a single issue and thus was too broad-based, we see this dynamism as a strength: a reflection of our expanded understanding of the various intersections related to issues of social injustice.

As visual representations of public demonstrations from dozens of politically minded participants around the country on this particular day of protest, this collection of powerful imagery and words speaks to the very essence of what true freedom might look like for every American.

With that in mind, Still They Persist: Protest Art of the 2017 Women's Marches will be continually reframed and re-contextualized as it travels. The exhibition is currently slated for stops at Wave Pool Gallery, (Cincinnati, Oh: May 13th – June 24th); Lexington Art League, (Lexington, Ky: July 28th – August 13th); and the Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati, Oh: Oct. 9th – 22nd). More locations throughout the country are tentatively being scheduled.